Gear & Gadgets —

CES opening day: Games, guns, and 3D printers

Check out our gallery of the many interesting things we saw and people we met.

LAS VEGAS—Ars' second day at the Consumer Electronics Show was maybe a bit more mellow than the first, despite it being the first official day of the show. Booths opened up, demos were shown, and at least one DeLorean may or may not have arrived from the past. Check out all the cool things we saw, and stay tuned for more updates, live from Las Vegas, this week.

The head-mounted display at Sony's booth wasn't very impressive, simply mirroring a cell phone display and floating it in front of your eyes with no tracking of any kind. But it does make you look like a cyborg from the near future very effectively.

Kyle Orland

The Super Retro Trio—which plays Super Nintendo, Genesis, and NES games in a single box—attracted more interest than a lot of other games we've seen at these kinds of conferences.

Kyle Orland

The future of video games, circa the late '70s, at a CES history display in the concourse.

Kyle Orland

Ars visited with Stardock and Oxide, getting more info on the Nitrous engine set to power the next Star Control game.

Lee Hutchinson

Around the back of the Gibson pavilion, we spied this time-traveling DeLorean. Clearly nefarious plans were afoot to steal 2014 technology and bring it back in time to 1985, thus pre-revolutionizing the technology revolution.

Lee Hutchinson

We also took a peek at the Pirate3D Buccaneer printer, which we hope to put through its paces soon.

Lee Hutchinson

TrackingPoint also invited us up to their suite to take a look at their latest product—a Precision Guided Firearm built on an AR platform.

BlackBerry giving away the only technology more ancient than BlackBerrys themselves. Hiyooo.

Casey Johnston

The Aime mount for a GoPro or smartphone camera that can auto-track a subject.

Casey Johnston

Everyone has curved TVs out on the floor, even Hisense. We wonder how many it would take to make a full circle.

Casey Johnston

If you put anything to sit on in your booth, your booth will always be full of people (resting their poor feet).

Casey Johnston

Sharp had its 8K TV up again, only one of two we've seen at the show.

Casey Johnston

Sony recycled its giant circle-booth from last year. It still looks cool.

Casey Johnston

Toshiba was showing off a smart medicine cabinet alongside a smartwatch.

Casey Johnston

Tivo has three guys trying to break the Guinness world record for consecutive hours of TV watched (86; they're going for 87). We feel like that's just our typical weekend. Guinness is welcome to come witness it at any time.

Casey Johnston

Acer's meeting room featured a blown-apart version of the most recent Aspire S7 Ultrabook, which we quite liked.

HP's new Z1 G2 all-in-one workstation has a 27-inch touchscreen, Nvidia Mobile Quadro GPUs, and Xeon or Core Intel processors. It opens up without tools for maintenance.

Sean Gallagher

An infrared camera "sled" for the iPhone from FLIR, the makers of military heat sensor hardware, is the company's first consumer product, due later this year. There will be a software developer kit to help app developers take advantage of the sensor.

Sean Gallagher

Gibson's Min-Etune is a robotic guitar tuner that automatically adjusts strings to a selected key or tuning type.

The "Smart" Medicine cabinet looks very interesting. Do you have any more details?

What is the selling point for curved TV's? Does the curve make the image look better?

The three in one classic gaming console looks interesting, but actually finding games that work for it and are not way over priced will be very hard. It would be nice if they would reissue some of them.

Hah! I remember suggesting something like this in comments to one of the first Ars stories on this gun and getting heavily downvoted for some reason . Shifting the center of gravity down can only improve stability, which is still important even with computer-assisted triggering.

On the subject of NAS. I assume the reason laptop HDDs aren't used even though it would make them considerably smaller, is that the biggest drive available is a 2 TB? Also on that first concept car. Main thing I'd be worried about is crash worthiness.

The robot guitar tuner looks a nice idea, though I wonder whether it would change the balance of the guitar.

The FLIR camera sled might be entirely awesome if the pricing is at all reasonable; I own a FLIR i7, it is quite probably the least justifiable of my possessions. FLIR, because they've got the patents on the sensors and because the sensors are currently export-controlled items so aren't yet manufactured in Chinese fabs, have been historically pretty bad at regarding trivial software features as things worth charging $500 extra for.

For example, you can't record video on the i7, and the low-end of the higher-resolution TS cameras don't even have take-a-photo functionality ... that was annoying enough that I returned the TS and got a close-out i7 instead.

On the subject of NAS. I assume the reason laptop HDDs aren't used even though it would make them considerably smaller, is that the biggest drive available is a 2 TB? Also on that first concept car. Main thing I'd be worried about is crash worthiness.

Even the 2TB drive isn't very available, and is 5400rpm which is now considered quite slow. I have the impression that 2.5" drives which their manufacturers are happy to have used in NAS applications are still sold at a ludicrous premium.

(for generic 2.5" drives there's less of a premium; £56.12 for a Hitachi 1TB 7200rpm 2.5" drive, £45.11 for a Seagate 1TB 7200rpm 3.5" drive ... but you really don't want to fill a NAS with 1TB drives when 3TB drives are £79.56)

The robot guitar tuner looks a nice idea, though I wonder whether it would change the balance of the guitar.

I think Gibson has had these out for at least a year. I played with one at Guitar Center before Thanksgiving. It seems pretty nifty and didn't change, in any appreciable way, how I held the guitar. The only downside I can think of is how it would affect first-time players with a bit of cash to plunk down for one of these, never learning to tune by ear. Admittedly, it's something I still struggle with. But it's still pretty damn cool.

Man, that Super Retro Trio 3 looks very cool! Personally i've enjoyed most of my favorite "classics" on my computer using an emulator but I have some less tech savvy friends who would love this kind of machine.

I hope you guys complaining about drive size in a NAS are using RAID6 or some sort of mirroring... the rebuild times after a drive failure for these huge drives are absurd in my experience. I've been fortunate not to lose a second while rebuilding a RAID5 setup.

Neither gearheads nor normals hold that territory. 'Tis a different breed of mankind which seeks out the frozen wilderlands, with its rugged individualist landscape and the massive federal subsidies to keep their tax rate artificially low.

Neither gearheads nor normals hold that territory. 'Tis a different breed of mankind which seeks out the frozen wilderlands, with its rugged individualist landscape and the massive federal subsidies to keep their tax rate artificially low.

What is the selling point for curved TV's? Does the curve make the image look better?

They're supposed to give a more immersive experience. I've heard they just skew geometric shapes on the tv. To me, it's just another gimmick to sell tvs. I can't imagine a small, curved tv creating an immersive experience like a large, curved movie theater screen creates.

Any chance of getting a "Hands on with..." article about the FLIR One? Because I'd love to know everything there is to know about it (resolution, framerate, more shots of pictures of stuff taken with it, etc.).